


The Unquiet Gate

by scribefindegil



Category: Gravity Falls, Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Crossover, Eleven get all the emotional support and breakfast food, Fix-It, Found Family, Gen, I do what I want, Justice For Barb, Stan is simultaneously the worst and best caretaker, mullet stan
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-25
Updated: 2016-10-15
Packaged: 2018-08-10 22:43:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 17,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7864096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribefindegil/pseuds/scribefindegil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the Portal re-activates only a year after Ford fell through it, Stan is thrilled. But the person that comes through isn't his brother. It's a strange, quiet girl with a shaved head who can only tell him that she came from somewhere bad. Stan is desperate to find out if she knows about Ford, or if her strange powers can help them find him, but at the same time he knows what it's like to be a kid in a bad place, and he'll do anything he can to keep her from going back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Monkey At The Typewriter

**Author's Note:**

> The idea for this au comes from logicalbookthief on Tumblr!

It was a dark and stormy night.

There had been a lot of those lately, the late autumn sky spitting down rain and thunder as if the town had personally insulted it. There’d been at least one lightning strike nearby, and the remains of the tree stabbed up into the sky like a warning finger, the paleness of the splintered trunk standing out in stark contrast to the dark, moss-covered pines that surrounded it. Many more days of this and the lake would burst its banks again, send the townsfolk scrabbling around to line the streets with sandbags and empty out their waterlogged basements.

If the Murder Hut had been open this late in the season, Stan could have made a killing selling umbrellas to the tourists. Most tourist traps shut down in the rain, but his just got more, as he liked to call it, “atmospheric.” But he’d closed up after Halloween, so all the atmosphere was good for was giving him another reason not to leave the basement.

He paced the kitchen as he waited for his coffee to brew, listening to the rain drumming on the roof and the occasional long, low rumbles of thunder. He felt guilty for using Ford’s coffeemaker. He felt guilty for using any of Ford’s things, and guiltier about the spaces he’d begun to carve out that were clearly his own. Just a little longer, he told himself. Just a little longer and you’ll get him home.

He’d been telling himself that every night for nearly a year. Every night, the Portal sat dark and lifeless and every night it got harder and harder to believe that would ever change. Stan sighed and ran his hand through his tangled hair. He had no idea what he was doing. Even the parts of the instructions that he could read made no sense, and he was missing so much.

The coffee was done. Stan pulled out the largest of Ford’s mugs. It had a chip in the rim and the molecular formula for caffeine printed on the side. It had taken him altogether too much time with a pile of chemistry textbooks to figure that out. Stan ran his fingers over the cracked glaze. Had Ford bought this mug himself? Had it been a gift? Certainly no one in their family would ever get something like that, but it would be nice to think that Ford had friends that knew him well enough to buy him nerd mugs.

Not that Stan had heard from many friends. He’d been terrified at first, as the weeks turned into months, that people out of Ford’s past would show up and call him out. He’d had plenty of dreams where they did, but so far he’d gotten nothing more personal than a few letters inviting him to attend conferences in subjects he couldn’t even pronounce. He’d thrown them away unopened.

Stan lifted the coffee pot to fill his mug, considered for a moment, and then set the mug down with a sigh and carried the pot with him instead as he made his way to the elevator. He keyed in the code and listened to the pounding of the rain on the roof slowly fade away as the elevator lowered him to the sub-basement. By the time the doors opened, he couldn’t hear a sound from the storm outside. It was like the rest of the world didn’t exist; there was just him and the Portal. He set the pot of coffee down on the table and pulled the pile of textbooks towards him.

This was going to be a physics night. He had a schedule: Take a book. Read until nothing makes sense anymore. Pause to hate self. Coffee. Read just one more page. Repeat. It was clear that whatever science (or magic, or both) Ford had used the build the thing, it was more than would be covered in the books Stan could find at the library. But he had to start somewhere. He’d already worked his way through the high school chemistry and biology textbooks, and he had college-level ones waiting for when he was done with physics.

He took a long swig of coffee directly from the pot and stared stubbornly at the page. He could already tell it was going to be one of those nights where he ended up just pounding the machinery with his fists. It had about as much chance of working. Ford was the one who knew how to use his brains. Stan had barely had any to begin with, and now with a decade of being battered around, not to mention some of the things he’d done so he didn’t have to think about being battered around, he probably had even less.

He sighed. Still. They said that if you gave a monkey a typewriter and enough time he’d eventually churn out the works of Shakespeare, so it stood to reason that if you gave an idiot the controls to an interdimensional doom portal, he’d eventually be able to make it do _something_.

The lights flickered. Stan glared at them. Damn storm. He rooted through the mass of papers and old food wrappers at his feet until he unearthed the flashlight he’d left there a few weeks ago.

As it turned out, Ford had a copy of the complete works of Shakespeare on his bookshelf, and Stan had ended up reading part of it just out of gratitude that it wasn’t another damn physics problem. Most of it went way over his head, even with the explanatory footnotes (although they were very different explanatory footnotes than the ones in the copies of _Romeo and Juliet_ they’d read freshman year of high school. Maybe he would have been more interested back then if he’d know that old Will had a dirtier mind than he did.). But there was one thing that he found oddly comforting. The monkey trying to write _Hamlet_ didn’t need to start off with one of those big fussy speeches full of made-up words. He’d need to get to them eventually, but the first line was just two words, and they were easy ones, too.

The lights flickered again, and this time they didn’t come back on. Stan flipped the switch of the flashlight. Nothing.

He cursed under his breath and smacked the thing against his leg. For a moment a faint light shone out and then it vanished, leaving Stan immersed in utter blackness. He knew the layout of the lab well enough by now. Surely he could make his way to the elevator . . . oh yes, the elevator that was powered by electricity. Great thinking, genius.

Before he had the chance to think anything further, there was a flash along with a noise like lightning. Stan flinched, glancing above him, but whatever it was hadn’t come from the lights. It was almost like . . . no. It couldn’t be. Could it?

There. It was unmistakable this time. Stan watched with bated breath as a blue spark arced across the rim of the Portal. The air sizzled with an electric tang and he felt the hair on his arms stand on end.

Maybe Ford had found some way to activate the thing from the other side. He was the genius; it would make sense. Why build a door you could only open from one direction?

The next flash lit up the entire room, long enough for Stan to push himself away from the incomprehensible controls and run towards the crackling mouth of the Portal. Between the bursts of light that seared jagged patterns on his retinas and the blackness, glowing with afterimages, he couldn’t quite make out what was happening, but as the center of the Portal glowed blue he thought he saw a dark shape in the center. It started off as no more than a dot and then grew into something that could almost, if you squinted your eyes and hoped, be human.

Then the light surged out and Stan was thrown backwards, just as he’d been almost a year ago when the Portal swallowed his brother up. He dropped the flashlight and, dimly, heard it smash on the cavern floor. Even as he slammed to the ground he forced himself to keep his eyes on the center of the Portal in case he could make out any details—a coat or a shock of unruly hair or the hand that would make him certain it really was his brother that was coming through.

But the light was too much and he couldn’t see anything except flat, blinding whiteness, and then it winked out and there was only flat, blinding darkness with glowing spots dancing across it as his eyes struggled to re-adjust.

In the blackness, he heard a sound—a slithering noise, and then a thump. And then silence.

“Who’s there?” he called. His voice echoed against the cavern walls, sounding small and far away.

There was no answer. Slowly, Stan began to crawl towards where the noise had been, feeling blindly in front of him. After a few feet, the lights flickered back on.

Stan drew in his breath. There was a figure there, sprawled and still on the floor, but it was too small to be Ford. Much too small.

The bitter bite of despair welled up in him, but it was tempered by something else. He knew he should be careful. Anything could have come out of that Portal. For all he’d poured over Ford’s journal he still had no idea where it led. Maybe it was some alien, Stan thought as he pulled himself to his feet and crept closer. Surely it was some alien, or another kind of monster thing like he was always seeing in the woods. It had to be some kind of supernatural thing, because otherwise . . . otherwise it had to be a kid.

It was wearing normal clothes: an oversized flannel shirt and a tattered pink dress. Maybe it was a monster that disguised itself as a kid to get sympathy, and it would eat him as soon as he got close. The smart thing was to be cautious, assume it was dangerous and approach slowly and carefully with a weapon in his hand.

Stan hesitated about half a second before he sighed and knelt next to the figure. Bleeding-heart idiot, that’s what he was. Served him right if he got eaten.

His breath caught in his throat as he caught a glimpse of the child’s face. To all appearances it was a child—a girl, as far as he could tell, though her hair was buzzed almost to the scalp. But what really drew his attention wasn’t the hair or the ragged clothes. It was the blood that caked her face below her nose and ears. It looked like there was even some crusted below her eyes, as if she’d been crying blood.

“What did they do to ya, kid?” he muttered.

Small and battered as she was, the girl was breathing steadily. Stan scooped her up, doing his best not to jostle her, and headed for the elevator. She didn’t respond when he lifted her into his arms, not so much as a hitch in her breathing. Her dress was damp, as if she’d been caught in the rain, but the shirt was dry and none of the blood trails had been smudged.

He carried the unconscious child upstairs and laid her gently on his bed. He’d be more comfortable on the couch anyway; after so long sleeping in his car he still wasn’t used to how soft mattresses were.

Ford had kept a very large first aid kit in his . . . Stan wasn’t really sure what to call any of the rooms, really, apart from the bedroom and the kitchen. When he’d arrived, everything was a mess of papers and garbage and laboratory equipment spread throughout the house. Regardless, there had been a very large first aid kit in the room with the dinosaur skull. It had clearly once been well-stocked, but when Stan had first opened it he’d found only a half-empty box of bandaids and a cracked bottle of hydrogen peroxide. He’d done some restocking since then, though his supplies looked measly in the large box. He picked up the whole thing and carried it back to the bedroom.

The girl hadn’t moved. Not that he was surprised, but honestly he wouldn’t have been surprised if she had. He wasn’t sure he’d really be surprised if she’d sprouted wings and started speaking in Hebrew. After almost a year in this crazy town, Stan was getting pretty difficult to surprise.

He wet a cotton pad and dabbed gently at her face, wiping away the trails of blood. There didn’t seem to be any swelling or bruising, which was odd. Any blow that could make someone bleed like that ought to have left some kind of mark. Stan probably had more experience than most with head injuries, and this didn’t look like any of the ones he’d seen before. There probably wasn’t much more he could do until she woke up.

He tossed the cotton away and sat back.

“What happened to you?” he asked the girl. Unsurprisingly, she didn’t respond.

Stan laced his hands together behind his head and settled into the chair beside her. He waited, while outside the rain continued to pour down, and in the basement the Portal sat as dead as it had been every other night since he arrived.


	2. The Lost Page

The night wore on with little change in either the weather or the girl’s condition. Eventually, Stan made another trip down to the Portal room to retrieve the coffeepot and the physics textbook. He paused in the control booth and looked up at the dark, ominous bulk of the Portal. There was no sign that just a few hours ago it had roared, however briefly, to life again. If it wasn’t for the girl sleeping upstairs he would have thought he’d imagined it. Well, calling it “sleeping” was being charitable. There was a difference between sleep and unconsciousness, and the girl was definitely going through the more dangerous of the two.

Stan walked across the empty space that separated the controls from the Portal itself, across the black and yellow line that he’d begun to wear away with his nightly pacing, and rested one hand on the paneling. It was cool to the touch. The great inverted triangle loomed over him, heavy and impassive.

He hoped she’d wake up soon.

He hoped that she’d wake up. Without knowing what had caused her injuries, he couldn’t be sure what state her brain was in. Head trauma was nasty stuff, and Stan had no idea what he would do with a comatose child from another dimension if she didn’t wake up in a day or so. He couldn’t exactly drop her off at the hospital. Well, he _could_ , but he wouldn’t. She was the only lead he had, the only new clue he’d gotten in nearly a year, and frankly, at this point, his only hope of getting Ford back if he couldn’t find those other two books.

Besides, he didn’t even know if she was human. She certainly looked it, but he’d been in Gravity Falls long enough to know that looking human didn’t mean that much. And weird as this town was, everything Ford had said about the Portal made it seem like Gravity Falls was nothing compared to what was on the other side.

Stan looked at his reflection in the polished metal. It was blurred and warped enough that he could ignore his long hair and the flabbiness of his shoulders and pretend, just for a moment . . .

“Hey, bro,” he said to the reflection. “I’m coming for ya, I promise.”

*

Even after he’d drunk the entire pot of coffee, Stan couldn’t make himself focus on the physics book. The words and symbols blurred together into one big incomprehensible mess, and he kept glancing up to check on the girl and losing his place. After an hour or so he gave up, shoving the book onto the bedside table with a growl of frustration. Its corner caught on the already-precarious pile of other books that were sitting there and sent the whole thing tumbling to the ground.

Stan did his best to catch them, but as with so many other things his best wasn’t nearly enough. He ended up with one and a half of the flimsy paperbacks clutched in his hands and a flurry of loose pages across his lap. When he bent to pick up the other volumes two of them slid out of their covers, the naked textblocks flopping onto the floor at his feet. He let the books he was holding join them and sunk his head into his hands.

What the hell did he think he was doing? He couldn’t fix the Portal. He couldn’t even fix the leaky faucet in the bathroom; how was he supposed to work a crazy sci-fi machine that had been built by a genius? He stared through his fingers at the covers of the garish paperbacks spilled across his feet. He’d found stashes of them throughout the house—Ford must have been reluctant to shelve them with all his fancy science books, but it was clear he’d gone through the things like candy. Stan had read a few, when the nights were long and he needed something to distract him from his thoughts. He could see why Ford had liked them; they were full of brilliant scientists developing world-changing technologies and beating back alien invasions with nothing but the power of their brains. Ford must have thought he was going to be like them, and then Stan had come along and ruined everything. Ruined everything twice now.

“Fuck,” he said aloud, then glanced guiltily over at the bed where the girl was sleeping. She hadn’t moved. Stan relaxed, but only slightly. He’d been worried about what he’d do if she didn’t wake up, but what was he going to do if she did? Apart from try to learn as much as he could about where she’d come from, of course. He didn’t know how to look after a kid. They needed . . . nutrients and things. Stan tried to remember what food he had in the house and drew a blank. There was brown meat of course, and . . . maybe the bread was still good? It had been a while since he’d remembered to eat anything besides coffee.

He jumped as a particularly loud crash of thunder made the walls shake. It was hard to believe the noise had come from the sky; it sounded so close, like it was rumbling up from the ground instead. Like the storm was shaking the whole world apart.

Another flash of lighting split the sky. The windows rattled. And the girl sat bolt upright and screamed like a banshee.

It caught Stan totally off guard. He screamed too and tried to jump up from the chair, but his feet slipped on the pile of pulp novels and shot out from under him. He scrabbled to keep his footing, failed, and landed heavily on his backside.

Okay, he thought, looking up at the ceiling. Now only one of you is screaming. That’s probably good. He waited for the girl to run out of breath, which took an impressively long time, before he sat up, raised his hands, and peeked over the side of the bed.

She was curled up by the headboard with her knees pulled in close, panting as she stared around her. One hand was extended in front of her, palm outwards, and when she saw Stan she locked both her gaze and her hand onto him. It was odd, the way she held her arm. It wasn’t like what Stan was doing, showing off his empty palms to make it clear he wasn’t a threat, and it didn’t look like she was trying to shield herself. If anything, she acted like she was holding a weapon.

“Hi,” he said.

Nothing about her pose or her expression changed. Of course, she probably spoke some weird space language. That was gonna make things real interesting. He’d picked up enough Spanish to get by, as well as the odd phrase in Russian and a whole slew of polyglot curses, but that probably wasn’t going to be much good here.

He focused on tone, as if he was soothing a wounded animal, trying to make his voice as soft and comforting as possible (which was still not very) and rose, very slowly, to his feet. “Look, I know you probably can’t understand me, but I’m not gonna hurt ya. Things might look . . . a little weird here. You came through a portal, like, a door, but instead of connecting rooms it connects dimensions. I don’t know what it was like where you were before, but I really hope you can tell me something about it cause my brother’s been stuck there for a long time and—”

“No.”

“I—wait, what?” It was amazing how little of the girl’s face moved when she spoke, as if she was using only the muscles she needed to make the sounds and not a single one more, as if she was one of those wooden puppets where the mouth could move up and down but everything else was frozen in place. But that wasn’t nearly as amazing as the fact that she’d _spoken_ , spoken as if she understood English, and maybe he was regretting being quite so candid, but if she could understand him and talk to him she could tell him about where Ford was, tell him how to get him back—

“Bad place.”

Okay, okay, he couldn’t panic. Not yet. He needed to get her to trust him and then he could ask later, find out what she knew. As much as it broke his heart to admit it, if Ford had survived wherever he was for almost a year, another day or two wasn’t going to make much difference. And if he hadn’t survived . . . well, Stan wasn’t going to think about that. Not yet. Not while the other possibility was still a possibility.

“Bad place, huh?” said Stan. “We got those here too. But this isn’t one, I promise.”

For the briefest moment, the girl’s eyes got fractionally wider. “Promise,” she repeated, and slowly lowered her hand.

She had the most piercing eyes Stan had ever seen. They seemed to bore into him as she stared unblinkingly up into his face. He recognized the look. He’d seen it too many times before—on the faces of injured animals, on the faces of street kids too young to have sunk down into hopelessness. On his own face in the rearview mirror more than once, when he’d gotten too far over his head.

“Ya got a name?” he asked.

The girl appeared to consider for a moment. Her eyes flicked rapidly back and forth across his face, and there was a slight shift in the set of her jaw.

“Eleven.” She said it like a challenge, and that was familiar too. When you were small and vulnerable you learned to bristle with defiance as best you could, like a kitten trying to look bigger by fluffing its fur up on end.

He tilted his head to the side and nodded slowly. He was careful to do everything slowly and to keep his hands empty and in plain sight so he didn’t spook her. “Eleven names, huh? That how things work where you come from? Tell you what, is there something people call you for short? Like I’m Stanford, but people call me Stan. You got something like that?”

Ford’s name was starting to feel natural to him. Much longer and it would feel more natural than his own; he hadn’t been “Stanley” since he was seventeen, and he’d been in prison the last time he kept up an alias for this long.

The girl shook her head sharply and pointed to herself, still not breaking eye contact. “Eleven,” she said again.

Stan blinked. “Wait, your . . . name is Eleven?”

She nodded, just one small dip of her chin, and continued to stare at him defiantly.

“Okay,” said Stan. “Okay. Eleven then. You come from a big family or somethin’?” He chuckled nervously at his own joke.

Instead of responding, the girl pulled up one sleeve and pointed silently at a mark on her arm. Moving as slowly and non-threateningly as he could, Stan leaned forward to look at it. The black ink stood out against the pale skin of her forearm, as stark as type on a page.

011.

Eleven.

Stan didn’t have any tattoos himself—he’d never managed to get together both the money and the inclination at the same time—but he’d seen plenty of them, especially when he was riding with Jimmy’s biker gang. He knew what they looked like when they were fresh and crisp and after they’d sunk in and faded with age.

There were hints of blue and feathering along the edges of the numbers. She’d had that tattoo for a long time.

Lightning flashed again and she flinched like a coiled spring, drawing her arm in close to her. Stan raised his eyes to Eleven’s terrified, defiant face. What the hell kind of bad place had she been in?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tune in next time for "Barb deserved an actual storyline so I'm resurrecting her and transporting her to Gravity Falls so she can get one!"


	3. The Back Road

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm very subtle.
> 
> (I'm not subtle)

“This is the third time something like this has happened! I’m telling you, there’s something going on here and I’m going to get to the bottom of it!”

Shandra slammed her iced coffee down on the counter. The gesture had probably been cool and dramatic in her head, but in reality the lid flew off and the coffee sloshed across the counter, the floor, and the front of Daryl’s uniform. He sighed and reached behind him for the mop.

“And I’m telling you it’s not a mystery that no one else takes your articles that seriously! You’re president of a high school newspaper, Shandra, not some fancy T.V. reporter.”

Shandra threw up her arms and spun around, her side ponytail orbiting her head like an extremely fluffy auburn cat trying to catch its own tail.

“It’s not about how prestigious we are, Daryl! I know that! But these people reached out to _me_ , and not about champion mud flaps or oddly shaped vegetables. They were scared. Mrs. Cutebiker was so nervous she dropped the phone and only agreed to meet with me at the dead of night, which is incidentally the only reason I’m awake at 5am on a Sunday—”

“How terrible that must be for you,” said Daryl dryly. Not that he minded taking the night shift, it was quiet and the Duskertons weren’t around to lecture him about how his generation was destroying the very fabric of society. Still, for all she was constantly talking about honing her observational skills Shandra could be pretty oblivious sometimes.

She kept ranting as if he hadn’t said anything. “But when I got there she was asleep!”

Daryl opened his mouth to point out that someone sleeping at night wasn’t exactly mysterious, but Shandra raised one finger as if anticipating his objections and continued, “And then when she did come to the door, it was like she didn’t even remember that she’d talked to me! I don’t think she was lying, I think she honestly didn’t remember. There’s something fishy going on. There’s someone who doesn’t want these stories getting out!”

Daryl finished wiping down the counter. “Uh-huh. And how did this mysterious conspiracy visit end?”

Shandra deflated. “She . . . told me to get out and chased me off with a broom.”

Daryl chuckled, and she glared at him. “You still have to pay for this coffee, by the way,” he said.

Shandra blinked, seeming to notice his sodden uniform for the first time. “Oh,” she said. “Sorry. Just give me a refill; I’ll pay for both.”

As Daryl filled the cup with ice, Shandra glanced outside. The rain was still bucketing down and the parking lot was one giant puddle, the reflection of the Dusk 2 Dawn’s neon sign flickering across it like a shattered mirror. The only dark patches were the outlines of Daryl’s bike, a grocery bag knotted over the seat in an overly-optimistic attempt to keep it dry, and the bulk of Shandra’s car.

“You get off in ten, right?” she said. “Need a ride?”

Daryl handed her the coffee cup, the lid pressed down extra tight this time.

“I wouldn’t say no.”

Putting up with Shandra’s conspiracies for another few minutes was well worth not having to ride home in the rain, so Daryl nodded and smiled agreeably while he waited for his shift to end. Fortunately, since Shandra mostly wanted to rant instead of having a real conversation, he just needed to slip into the blankly complacent expression he wore when a customer was complaining about the price of hot dogs or Ma Duskerton was complaining about how back in her day young people knew the meaning of respect. Unlike the customers and Mrs. Duskerton, he thought that Shandra probably realized what he was doing but was too happy about having a captive audience to call him on it.

At 5:32, they saw another set of headlights outside as a huge black car pulled into the parking lot. The door of the Dusk 2 Dawn opened with a ding and Greg Valentino slunk inside. He froze when he saw Shandra. She bristled, and the two of them pointedly refused to make eye contact.

“Store’s all yours, Greggy!” said Daryl with forced cheerfulness. He tossed the keys to his coworker and walked briskly toward the door. For a moment it looked like he’d be able to escape before anyone broke the furious silence, but as he and Shandra reached the door Greg called, “Watch out for that one, Daryl! The bitch’ll break your heart and your bones!”

Shandra whirled like a Fury. Daryl wouldn’t have been surprised if her eyes actually started spitting fire. He considered trying to pull her away but thought better of it; as unenthused as he was about being witness to a murder he was even less ready to be the victim.

“Ignore him, Shandra,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Having apparently developed a self-preservation instinct in the past ten seconds, Greg didn’t say anything else, and even had the sense to put the counter and register between him and Shandra, who was still fuming like a live grenade. After a moment she drew a very deep breath and spun back around, shoving the door open and stepping out into the rain. Daryl half-expected the drops to sizzle when they touched her.

“He tried to _break_ into my _house_!” she hissed.

Daryl shrugged. He’d heard the story about a hundred times before. “Some people would have thought it was romantic.”

Shandra huffed, shooting a last vicious look over her shoulder. “We’d gone on two dates! Two! And then he shows up unannounced at my bedroom window! Of course I wasn’t going to let him in; it’s not my fault that he broke his wrist when he fell!”

Daryl bent to unlock his bike. “Hey, I never said it was.”

They were both soaked to the skin by the time they’d maneuvered the bike into the backseat of Shandra’s beat-up old Ford. Daryl piled the notebooks and recording equipment mounded on the passenger seat next to it and climbed in, rubbing his hands together as he waited for the radiator to come on. Shandra leaned out the door and squeezed as much water as she could from her hair before starting up the windshield wipers and pulling slowly out of the lot.

“You’re on Woodpecker Drive, right?” she asked. The puddle across the parking lot was deepest at the turn onto the main road, and as they pulled out jets of water shot up from the wheels.

“That’s right,” said Daryl. “Woodpecker and Elm.”

“Hmm.” Shandra peered into the darkness ahead of them. “Main Street’s more direct, but I’m sure all of downtown’s three inches deep by now. Let’s try the back way that goes along Gopher Road; it’s higher ground.”

Daryl stared out the window. The rain was coming down so hard he could barely see the trees that flanked the road, except in moments when they were illuminated by flashes of lightning.

“You can take any road you want so long as I get home in one piece,” he said.

Shandra nodded and spun the wheel. The car skidded slightly on the wet pavement and then righted itself as they began to climb uphill along Gopher Road.

*

Shandra peered into the gloom ahead of them. She was unwittingly retracing the route she’d driven earlier to get back from the Cutebikers’ house on the East end of town, and the visibility was even worse than it had been an hour ago. She flicked on her brights in case they could help her see through the driving rain, but they just reflected it like an undulating glass curtain. She turned them off and shivered. The car’s radiator had been on the fritz for months, and every time she tried saving up to fix it she found another piece of broadcasting equipment that she needed more.

At least the radio worked. She nudged the power button and the strains of Elton John’s _I’m Still Standing_ blasted through the car. She rolled her shoulders, wincing as a little of the tension crackled out of them. There. Already things seemed less gloomy.

“And did you think this fool could never win?” she sang, loudly and enthusiastically and perhaps not quite on key. “Well look at me I’m coming back again!”

Daryl looked horrified. Shandra elbowed him across the seat. “You were singing along to the store radio when I arrived; don’t look at me like that,” she said, flashing him a sidelong smile.

It took a few more lines before he joined in, but by the time the first chorus was over they were belting along together. It even felt like the radiator had decided to kick in after all. Shandra signed contentedly. She’d drop Daryl off, and then she’d go home and take a nice hot shower and maybe a nap, and then she’d go through her notes and recordings and figure out exactly what everyone was hiding. But shower first.

The road cut a wide curve through the trees, the last real turn before they’d hit the intersection with Elm. “I’m still standing after all this time!” they sang as they rounded the curve.

Daryl saw the figure in the road before she did. His voice rose into a scream and he reached out and grabbed her arm just as Shandra noticed the pale shape caught in the headlights. She slammed on the brakes and jerked the wheel to the side as hard as she could. Daryl continued to scream as they spun, slowed, and then, with surprising serenity, tipped sideways into the ditch.

Shandra’s knuckles were white as she gripped the wheel, breathing heavily and staring at the mass of mud and brush which was all she could see through the windshield. Beside her, Daryl’s scream slowly petered out.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah!” sang the radio happily.

“You okay?” asked Shandra in a monotone.

“Yeah. You?”

“Fine.”

Daryl tried to peer out the darkened window. “Did you hit her?”

“That was a her?” Shandra did her best to remember what she’d seen, but it her recent memory was all just a black-and-silver blur. “I don’t think so. I don’t—”

Something hit the driver’s side window and this time they both screamed.

“Sorry!” came a voice from outside. “I’m so sorry! Are you all right?”

Shandra looked across at Daryl. He made a face and shrugged. Slowly, heart pounding, Shandra unbuckled her seatbelt, unlatched the door, and climbed out of the car. She noticed that Daryl made no move to follow her.

Standing in the middle of the road, wringing her hands, was a girl. As Shandra straightened up, a lightning flash illuminated the scene. She could see the skid marks where she’d swerved to avoid the girl, black against the already dark surface of the pavement.

Shandra knew she was going to be a famous reporter one day, so she’d gotten very good at noticing things. The third thing she noticed about the girl was her glasses. They were very large and the lenses were round as the full moon, but they sat crookedly on her face in a way that suggested at least one of the hinges was broken. She hadn’t moved to fix them or to clean off the water droplets that coated the surface.

The second thing Shandra noticed was that she was missing one shoe and the lower part of one pant leg. She stood lopsidedly, her bare toes curling nervously into the pavement. There was no sign of the other shoe anywhere on the road, and from the way she limped when she took a step it seemed like it might have been lost for a while.

But the first thing Shandra noticed about the girl was the blood. If the lightning hadn’t been so bright she might not have noticed it at all, might not have been able to tell the difference between the dark stains from the rain soaking into her clothes and the other, redder stains. But just for a second the lighting had lit things up as if it was day, and Shandra could see the blood-stained bandage wrapped around the girl’s hand, the gashes down her bare leg and the dark trail behind her.

“Oh my god,” said Shandra. “Did I do that to you?”

The girl shook her head dazedly. “No . . . no, you missed . . .”

Shandra took a step forward. “Then what did? What’s your name? Where did you come from?”

The girl’s lip started to tremble. She bit down on it vengefully and breathed for a moment, short, intense breaths in and out. When she spoke her voice was steady, but she sounded lost and very tired and like she might start to cry at any minute.

“That’s the problem,” she said. “I have no idea. I don’t remember.”


	4. The Jane Doe

Shandra had prided herself on her ability to take charge of a situation ever since she was old enough to realize that “bossy” just meant “a girl who knows how to get things done.” She’d led a school-wide protest in support of longer lunch periods when she was in third grade. The month before her birthday every year she’d sit her parents down with a detailed chart of potential gifts, color-coded by price point. When she found out the high school didn’t have a student newspaper she’d hounded the school board until they agreed to front the printing costs and started one herself. She was used to being the one making decisions.

But she really wished, for once in her life, that there was someone else around to take charge for her. Sixteen felt like practically being an adult until, abruptly, it didn’t.

Shandra took a deep breath and shoved the panic to the back of her head. She’d learned that there was no point trying to make those thoughts smaller but she could at least relegate them to a page-three byline. The top story at the moment was getting the three of them out of the storm and getting the mystery girl some medical attention.

She winced. Maybe getting herself some medical attention too. Now that the immediate shock was wearing off, she could feel the ache across her chest where her seatbelt had caught her. It was going to leave one hell of a bruise.

Okay. They weren’t getting the car out without a tow truck, and they weren’t getting a tow truck without a phone and they didn’t have a phone, so they needed to find someone who did. There weren’t too many houses out this way—most buildings in Gravity Falls were clustered around the downtown area, huddling together as if they were afraid to build farther out into the woods. At the moment, Shandra couldn’t blame them. Still, there were a few. The Cutebikers lived down the road a mile or so, but a mile was a long way in this weather. There was that weird tourist place, but trying to shelter at a place called “The Murder Hut” was asking for more trouble than she felt prepared to deal with.

She ran her mind’s eye over the map of the town she’d memorized back when she got her first paper route. Surely there must be somewhere else . . . yes, that was right. There was one house nestled right at the corner of Gopher and Elm that she always forgot about because they didn’t get the newspaper.

Feeling much better now that she had a plan, Shandra smiled at the girl and said, “All right. We’ll go get you cleaned up and then we’ll figure out what happened, okay? It’ll all be fine.”

The girl nodded shakily and Shandra stepped back to the car. She tugged on the door handle.

And tugged again.

“Daryl, did you lock yourself in?” she asked, rapping on the window in disbelief.

“Course I did!” he replied. “You ever seen a horror movie? You can get out of the car to investigate the spooky noises if you want; I’m staying right here where it’s safe!”

“It’s my car!” Shandra snapped, rapping on the window. “Let me in!”

Daryl shook his head. “Nuh-uh.”

“Look, it was just a hurt girl. Nothing scarier than that!”

Daryl was unmoved.

“You know what?” said Shandra. “Fine. You can stay here, by yourself, and wait for the battery to die which I’m guessing will take about half an hour in this old clunker. _We_ are going to walk a grand total of three hundred yards to the Durlands’ house where they have a phone and electricity and maybe even some hot drinks. Have fun sitting alone in the dark.”

She’d barely turned around before she heard the latch click behind her.

“That’s what I thought,” she said.

Daryl climbed out, grumbling the entire time. Shandra leaned in and grabbed her keys, as well as the portable tape recorder in its waterproof case and her high-powered flashlight. There. She felt much more prepared now.

Shandra turned to face her companions. “All right, let’s go!” she said. “Onwards and upwards and all that.”

She glanced down at their Jane Doe’s bare foot. “Can you walk all right? I’m sure I could help—”

“I’m fine,” the girl said. Shandra was dubious but she wasn’t going to argue yet. Wait until they were inside and then she could take stock of things properly.

They headed up the road in a tight cluster, moving slowly so that the girl could keep up. The other two jumped at every flash of lighting. Shandra was a professional and did nothing of the sort.

She did let out a sigh of relief once they could finally see the house through the dark shapes of the trees. There was even a light twinkling in one of the windows. She’d seen the house before and knew that in daylight it was a small, ramshackle building, badly painted and nondescript, but at the moment it looked like the warmest and most homely refuge she’d ever laid eyes on.

That was observer’s bias, she reminded herself. Remember that.

When they got to the driveway, Daryl ran ahead and pounded on the door. Shandra was following more slowly when the mystery girl took one step on the wet gravel and hissed in pain. She stumbled, and Shandra nearly dropped the flashlight in her haste to catch her. After that, she let Shandra take her arm and together they limped toward the shelter.

By the time they reached the door they could hear someone moving around inside. The latch slid back and the door opened a tiny bit. A long, toothy face that seemed to be made mostly of nose and braces peered out past the security chain.

Daryl looked like he was about to charge inside, regardless of what that did to the door or the person behind it, so Shandra grabbed him by the collar of his uniform shirt and smiled brightly.

“Hi!” she said. “Our car broke down. Can we use your phone?”

The door shut. Then there was a metallic noise and it opened again, without the chain this time. Shandra recognized the boy behind it; she was good with faces and his ears were so big they could have their own slot in a line-up. Edwin Durland. He’d just started high school that year after taking some extra time to finish up eighth grade. Otherwise unremarkable—no extracurriculars that she was aware of. Didn’t get in trouble. Kept to himself. He was the kind of person who, despite his prominent features, tended to fade into the background.

“Sure,” he said uncertainly. “My Mom’s at work so she can’t drive you anywhere . . .”

“Somewhere out of the rain where we can wait for the tow truck to come will be fine, thank you!” said Shandra, stepping smartly inside. Daryl followed them, shutting and latching the door the second they crossed the threshold.

Edwin gawped when he saw the Jane Doe. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” she said again, even less convincingly than the first time. Then she took another step, swayed, and swooned onto Shandra’s shoulder.

Daryl and Endwin both screamed and tried to hide behind each other.

“Is she dead?” asked Edwin.

“She’s possessed, isn’t she?” said Daryl. “I knew I should never have gotten out of that car!”

Shandra rolled her eyes. “She fainted, that’s all. Do you have a couch?”

Following Edwin’s trembling finger, Shandra carried the girl into the next room and laid her down on the threadbare sofa. Not that she had much experience carrying other people around in her arms, but the girl felt strangely light for her size.

She turned around to see both boys peering around the doorframe.

“Who is she?” asked Edwin.

“That,” said Shandra, “Is the question.”

She’d been withholding judgement until they got inside to a place with good, consistent lighting, but now she was sure. Shandra was good with faces, and she knew, to a greater or lesser degree, every face in Gravity Falls. But she’d never seen the girl before in her life.

She stood up and stretched. Now that they were inside, she could feel a little of the tension seep from her shoulders. And now she had another mystery to look into.

But first things first.

“Have you got a first aid kit?” she asked. “And maybe some warm washcloths—we should try to clean her up a little.”

Edwin nodded nervously and vanished into the bathroom. Shandra made a note of its location for future reference. When he returned he was clutching the first aid kit to his chest like a particularly small and impractical shield. He handed it to her, along with a couple of damp cloths, and then fled back to the kitchen.

To her surprise, Daryl slunk out and took one of the cloths, helping her wipe down the girl’s injured leg. She looked at him quizzically.

“The way I figure it,” he said, “If her head starts spinning around she’ll get you first.”

“What makes you think this is anything supernatural?” Shandra asked. She removed the makeshift bandage from the girl’s hand. The cut underneath was nasty, but didn’t seem to be infected. Didn’t look fresh, either. She swabbed it with antiseptic and bandaged it back up.

“Middle of the night?” said Daryl. “Spooky storm? Mysterious stranger driving us off the road? My money was on a ghost at first, but she seems pretty solid to me.”

“You know there aren’t any reliable ghost sightings in this part of town,” said Shandra. “They’re all to the north of here.”

“And you know you could get in trouble for talking about things like that. Let the undead unrest in peace! Don’t you have something better to do than stirring up trouble?”

“I’m going to make a career out of stirring up trouble,” said Shandra. “I need all the practice I can get!”

Truth be told, she was glad Daryl was heckling her. It gave her something to think about besides what her hands were doing. From an investigative perspective, the wounds were very interesting, but the kind of interesting that even she would prefer to read about rather than witness. Something—almost certainly not some _one_ unless they’d strapped blades to all their fingers—had caught her by the leg. The scratches started out shallow and got progressively deeper. It was clear she’d struggled hard before she escaped. The blood loss was worrying, and as soon as they had reliable transportation they should probably get her to a hospital, but it looked like no major blood vessels had been damaged. They cleaned up the caked blood as best they could, dabbed at the wounds with disinfectant, and wrapped the leg in fresh bandages.

Shandra sat back with a sigh. Okay. That had been necessary, and unpleasant, and now it was over. She headed into the bathroom to wash her hands, scrubbing aggressively up to the elbows long after the water ran clear. She stuck her tongue out at her reflection in the mirror. What a mess.

She let her hair down and patted it with a hand towel so at least it wouldn’t actively drip behind her. She dried off her face, too, glad she’d been too tired to put on mascara when she got up that morning. She left her jacket hanging over the shower head, pulled off her squelching shoes and socks, and wrung as much water as she could out of her shirt. That was probably the most presentable she was going to get unless she could find some dry clothes to borrow.

Squaring her shoulders, Shandra took one last look at herself in the mirror and headed out to face the world. The boys were both hiding in the kitchen, leaving the Jane Doe alone on the couch.

“Edwin!” she called. “Can you get a glass of water for when she wakes up? And if there’s any coffee in this house that would be _great_.” She’d only had two and a half cups that day, counting the one that was now splashed all over the interior of her car, and that was hardly enough to deal with a regular morning. Looking after a pair of screaming teenage boys and a girl who’d appeared out of nowhere were the kind of circumstances that required more like two and a half pots. At least.

“Oh, my Mom won’t let caffeine in the house,” said Edwin. “She says it’s an enticement. Not sure what to. Everything, I expect. Same with unprocessed food, musical instruments, and works of fiction.”

Shandra’s smile went brittle. “Of course!” she said. “That’s . . . fine!”

“I could make you hot chocolate?”

Better than nothing. Not much better, but she was starting to shiver and it would help to get something warm into her. “Please! And thank you.”

Daryl peered at her suspiciously. “And what are you gonna do?”

“I,” said Shandra, “Am going to investigate!”

She’d unzipped the first pocket on the girl’s puffy blue coat when Daryl pushed her hand away. “Woah woah woah! You’re gonna rob her?”

“I’m . . . looking for an ID?” said Shandra. “It’s standard practice.”

“Hrmph.”

The girl’s wallet was in the other pocket. Slim. Brown. Practical. Not much in the way of decoration. Not that much in the way of content, either, but there was a driver’s license.

“Indiana?” she said out loud. How had she ended up in Oregon? The license was definitely hers, though, and although Shandra was no expert on spotting fakes it looked legitimate enough.

She sat back on her haunches looked between the license and the girl’s face. The girl on the couch was covered in water and grime and threads of a sticky grey-brown substance like giant spiderwebs, and under the grime her face was so pale that her freckles stood out like spots of ink. Her hair was limp and tangled and her face looked gaunt. In the photo, she was put-together and smiling, her hair done up in a neat coif and the high collar of her shirt clean and pressed. Her glasses were unbroken and her face was plump and pink. She looked like she’d just thought of a rather good joke and was trying to decide whether to share it.

Shandra slipped the license back into the wallet and put it down on the endtable.

“Well. Nice to meet you, Barbara Holland,” she said.


	5. The Safe House

The room is full of things. It’s full of shapes and colors and messes. She likes it. It looks nothing like home.

The first thing she sees is that the walls aren’t white, and that’s enough to stop her from throwing the other person in the room into them. 11 has seen only white walls all her life. L-short-for-11 has seen so many colors since she ran away. Colors that weren’t in the books Papa used to read to her. Colors she doesn’t know the names of.

She’s not home. She didn’t dream it. They didn’t take her back.

She remembers the school. She remembers reaching out, clearing the way for her friends when the bad men came. She remembers the monster.

Her monster. Her gate. Her fault.

She remembers the moment when she decided to fix things. When she decided that the monster would never hurt her friends ever again. She remembers screaming—

She knows how to break things. Maybe she knows it better than anything else. It’s what Papa was proudest of her for. Breaking things. Breaking people. Breaking the world.

She doesn’t always know how she does it. Sometimes she thinks about it—find the bone and make it snap, find the brain and make it bleed, find the wall and make it shatter. Sometimes she just _pushes_ —no go away go _away_ —and the power seems to act on its own. When she killed the monster she pushed with everything she had, breaking it and breaking it and breaking it again until it was nothing but dust.

She thought she’d been breaking herself, too. She thought that she’d be as dead as the monster. Everything was red and pain and screaming and _I’m sorry, Mike_ and _just stop just make it stop just take me away_. And then there’s the part she doesn’t remember. And then there’s here.

“Tell ya what,” says the stranger. “You want something to drink? Something to eat?”

_Eat_. “Eggos?”

The stranger blinks. He has a deep voice like Papa’s but his hair is long and shiny. Pretty.

“What, like, the toaster waffles?”

L nods.

“They . . . got those where you come from?”

She nearly nods again, then stops herself. 11 never got Eggos. 11 got the same food every day, on the same white plate in the same white room, as long as she was good. If she was bad she got nothing. So she shakes her head. No. Where she comes from, they don’t have Eggos.

“Okay . . . well. I’ll go to the store tomorrow. Pick you up some, okay?”

“Okay.” She was wrong. His voice isn’t like Papa’s. It’s deeper. Grumbly like bike wheels. And . . . something she doesn’t have a word for. But she’s heard it in Mike’s voice and sometimes in Dustin’s, in Will’s mother’s when she held her and told her she was brave. In the voice of the man who first gave her food after she ran away, who had hair on his chin but none on his head. It’s a strange sound, but it’s . . . good. It’s good like being L instead of 11 is good.

“Well, lemme go see what we’ve got. Sure I can rustle you up something,” says the stranger. Stan. That’s what he’d said. Stan-short-for-Stanford. “You stay here and rest, okay?”

She nods, and smiles, and waits for him to leave before she climbs out of the bed. It’s so much bigger than hers. Bigger and more colorful and messier. She runs her hands over every blanket and they all feel different. Her favorite is red like the bricks in her picture book and feels like the one she’d slept on in Mike’s basement.

The floor isn’t even, and when she looks down she sees books piled around her feet. Some of them are broken. She picks one up. There’s a monster on the cover, and in a man in a suit that looks like the one she used to wear in the Bath. He’s yelling and pointing something at the monster.

She drops the book and moves on.

Her head hurts. It hurts more when she moves. It hurts most when the sky outside flashes and shouts and she jumps. _It’s just a thunderstorm_ , Mike had said the night she met him when she wanted to hide from the noises in the sky. _It’s just a thunderstorm_ , she says to herself. But at home they didn’t have thunderstorms, and the thunder sounds like the Gate cracking open.

She tries to reach out and listen for the Gate. She tried to close it. She doesn’t know if it worked. She closes her eyes and listens in the way that doesn’t use her ears, in the way that Papa said made her special.

_Dark. It always starts off dark. Just her and the blackness. She searches. Listens. There’s nothing and there’s nothing and there’s nothing and then—_

_A sound. A . . . laugh? Or a scream. Or both. She’s weak and it’s faint but she stumbles towards it, sees a speck of yellow in the distance—_

She comes back halfway to the floor, doesn’t even have time to catch herself, only to close her eyes and flinch as she falls.

“Holy heeee . . . helicopters, kid!”

She’s not lying on the floor. Instead she’s caught up in two arms, big and strong and soft. They lift her higher and she blinks, staring up into Stan’s face. He looks scared. But he shouldn’t. He doesn’t know what she can do yet. He doesn’t know he should be afraid of her.

“Look, I’m glad you can’t take an order, but at least stay in bed until getting up isn’t gonna make you faint, okay?”

His hair falls over one shoulder close to her head. She smiles. Reaches out to touch it. “Pretty . . .” she says.

He laughs. “That’s the first time anyone’s called me that in a long time! Maybe ever, come ta think of it . . .”

Then his laugh stops and so does his smile. She feels the blood running from her nose and tries to wipe it away before Stan sees, but she’s slow and the arms holding her go stiff.

“Kid . . .” Stan lays her down on the bed. “Okay, listen, ya gotta . . . shhhhh . . .” He tries to swallow back the word with a frown, like it’s medicine. “Shoe polish! You gotta talk to me, okay? What happened to your head?”

She wipes the blood with a corner of her sleeve. “It’s fine.”

He laughs again. Not a funny laugh. A scared one. “Bleeding outta your head is not fine, kid, take it from me. Now just . . . let me look at ya.”

He stares into her eyes, moves his head and watches her as she looks back and forth, gets out a light and shines it into her face. 11 would have stayed still, but L flinches from the light, and Stan sighs.

“P—please, kid. Eleven. You don’t have ta do this and I know it ain’t fun, but just let me check one thing. It’ll take five seconds and then you can have the cocoa I about about to bring ya when you had your little fainting spell. Okay?”

She thinks. The walls aren’t white and he isn’t telling her what to do. He’s asking. That’s enough.

She opens her eyes, winces at the brightness but keeps staring forward as he shines a light into one eye, then the other. Then he stops and smiles at her.

“No concussion, far as I can tell. I don’t know what the he—heck happened to you, but it don’t look like you’re gonna be dying on me just yet. Now: food!”

She moves to get out of bed and he catches her by the shoulders. “Nope nope nope. You are not going anywhere, young lady. You . . . are gonna get up again as soon as I leave, aren’t ya?”

Of course she is. She needs to know if this place is safe. She needs to know if Stan is safe. She needs to know what happened to the Gate.

She doesn’t say anything, but Stan reaches out and picks her up again. “We’re just going to the kitchen,” he explains. “There’s not much; can’t say I was expecting visitors. But we should be able to fill that belly up.”

He walks down a hall. Its walls aren’t white either. The room he sets her down in has two white walls, but they’re dirty and have drawings on them. The chair she’s in shakes. It’s near a window, and she tries to hide from the outside, sink down so that no one can see her.

“You scared?” says Stan.

She looks at him. Nods. He closes the curtains.

“That’s fair,” he says. “But you’re safe here, okay?”

She shakes her head. Not safe here. Not safe anywhere. Any time she thinks she is the bad men come, or the monster, or both.

“C’mon, now,” he says, putting something it front of her. It’s brown and steams and smells like the chocolate bars Dustin gave her. “Nothing’s gonna mess with us. I got a pretty mean left hook.”

He shows her his fist. He’s smiling. But she won’t look at him. She looks down at the cup instead. The smell still reminds her of Dustin. And Stan’s smile reminds her of Benny. And she can’t stay here or bad things will find them. They’ll hurt her. They’ll hurt him, and it will be her fault. She doesn’t want to be the monster.

“You shouldn’t help me,” she says, and looks up at him. Stan stops smiling. “They’ll hurt you. The bad men.” And she holds up two fingers and points them at his head, _bang_. It's hard to say so many words, but she needs to. Needs to make him understand.

His eyes get big. He’s not scared like Mike was. He looks angry, and she tries to be smaller, wonders if she could run without using her powers on him. She’s so tired. She doesn’t want to fall over again.

“Look,” he says. “I’ve had bad men after me before. Real bad. But I’m still here. I won’t let them get you. And I won’t let them get me, either. Okay?”

He can’t say that. The bad men are strong and there are so many of them and none of her friends could get away before. But she wants it to be true, and so she asks, quietly, “Promise?”

“Yeah,” says Stan. “Promise. Now drink up.”

It’s almost-but-not-quite too hot to drink, and it’s so much sweeter than anything 11 ever got to eat. L rolls her tongue around in her mouth after she swallows. She drinks in big gulps and soon the cup is empty.

“You like that, huh? They have cocoa in your dimension?”

She’s never had it before, so she shakes her head.

“How about pancakes?”

She shakes again.

“Well then, you’re in for a treat!” He smiles, big so she can see all his teeth. She smiles back, small and uncertain. She’s so hungry and so tired and she knows, in a way she can’t explain, that she’s far away from home. So maybe she can relax. Just for tonight. Maybe she’ll be safe. Maybe he will be.

She looks at Stan as he picks up a box and a bowl and a cup of water. He’s singing about what he’s doing. Soon there’s a funny hissing sound and she smells something that makes her stomach rumble.

She just needs to sleep, and then she’ll be able to listen again. She’ll make sure the Gate is shut. Make sure the bad men won’t come.

And Stan will be all right. He promised.


	6. The Screaming Spatula

Stan was not, naturally, a big worrier. Judging by some of the things he’d gotten caught up in during the last few years, it was tempting to say that he didn’t worry enough. He kept his cool as long as he could. Took things as they came. Hoped for the best, expected the worst. Well. Expected _a_ worst. The world seemed to have a talent for taking what he thought was rock bottom and revealing it to be just a stopping-off point on a fall to some whole new level of terrible.

The whole Portal business had to take the cake. If only he’d known, when he first got out of the car outside of Ford’s crazy paranoia shack, that in a few minutes he’d give anything to be back in New Mexico with a half-dozen pesos to his name and a price on his head, he’d . . .

Well, he wouldn’t have believed any of it, would he? At least that was one mistake he’d gotten over by now. He’d spent a year in Gravity Falls, and that was more than long enough to learn that anything was possible in this town.

Take, for example, his current predicament. It was who-knew-what-hour of the morning, and he was standing in his kitchen—Ford’s kitchen—cooking pancakes for a traumatized girl from another dimension who’d barely spoken except to tell him that her name was a number, there were men with guns after her, and apparently wherever she came from was big on toaster waffles. Oh, and she thought his hair was pretty.

Stan sighed and flipped the pancake. He should get a haircut. He should have gotten a haircut a long time ago, but he kept putting it off. He just . . . he wanted Ford to recognize him when he came back. He wanted to look like he had when Ford had last seen him, stupid hair and everything. He wanted something that would let him pretend it hadn’t taken him so long.

Stan snorted. He didn’t know what he was trying to accomplish. It wasn’t like he didn’t know exactly how much time had passed, and he couldn’t imagine that Ford wasn’t keeping track himself, marking down the days in some notebook so he could chew Stan out over every single one of them. And it wasn’t like looking the same was going to speed things up, or make them talk, or fix the fact that he was legally dead as of a month ago. He shook his head. Honestly, what was wrong with him? He’d fake his death to make the con work but he wouldn’t cut his hair.

He checked the underside of the pancake. Probably a little browner than it should be, but the girl didn’t look like the sort to be picky. She looked like the sort to scarf down any food she could get. Stan transferred the first pancake to a plate and poured another dollop of batter into the hot pan. He glanced guiltily around the kitchen as he waited for it to cook. He’d go shopping tomorrow. He needed her to trust him if he was gonna find out what she knew, and for a kid like that the way to her heart was probably through her stomach. He could . . . probably pay for things. The downside of being stuck in one place for so long was that people recognized you. Sure, he still stole stuff—had to spend most of the money he got on Ford’s stupid overpriced mortgage—but it took more effort than when he’d just roll through a town and be gone before the shmucks realized what was missing.

He wondered if anyone would miss Eleven. She seemed to have loosened up a little since he’d given her the hot chocolate. Or since he’d told her he wasn’t going to let any “bad men” get them. Maybe both. The tension in her was still there, but she kicked her legs against the chair while she waited and flashed him a tiny smile when he grinned back at her.

Bubbles were forming on the top of the second pancake, so Stan worked the spatula underneath and flipped it. He’d stolen the spatula himself after a few early mishaps with Ford’s cooking equipment. No utensils should scream. That shouldn’t be a controversial statement, but apparently his brother hadn’t agreed.

He’d have to keep the girl from poking around the house too much. He’d gotten pretty good at navigating around all Ford’s junk himself, but there was probably some pen that turned you into a bird if you wrote with it or something still lying around. Had to keep the kid in one piece if he was going to . . .

What was he going to do with her, exactly? Even if he could figure out how to link the Portal back to where she came from, which he couldn’t, did she have anywhere to go back to? Anyone? Someone had to have given her that huge flannel shirt, unless she’d stolen it. Frankly, learning that whatever was beyond the Portal was a place that had flannel made Stan feel a little better about the whole business. Not much better. But at least it was a real place with real things, not just some void full of monsters. Eldritch horrors didn’t wear flannel. He was . . . pretty sure about that.

So someone had helped her, and then . . .

Stan remembered the intensity of the girl’s stare as she pointed two fingers at his head. Yeesh. She was too young to be dealing with shit like that. Not that it mattered, not that the world ever put an age limit on messing people up, but still. Kids shouldn’t have to deal with that. Just like spatulas shouldn’t scream. It was common sense, but see if the universe cared.

Stan had been twenty years old the first time he saw someone get shot. Twenty-four the first time it had been someone he knew. That was bad enough, but at least it had been his own fault he’d ended up in those crowds. His fault he’d gotten kicked out in the first place. This kid couldn’t be more than twelve or thirteen at the oldest. What kind of people shot someone for helping out a twelve-year-old?

He stopped that train of thought in its tracks. All the reasons that he could think of were Bad with a capital B, the kind of thing that even he didn’t want to think about. The important thing was that she was here now, and whoever was after her was in a completely different dimension. He’d just need to be careful that when Ford came back nobody else came with him. That, and maybe find a way to lock the elevator at the top floor before he went to sleep.

The next pancake was done. Stan slid it onto the plate with his perfectly normal spatula, then turned around with a grin and a wave of his hand, the way he did when he was showing off for the tourists. Eleven gave him another one of those lightning-quick smiles.

As soon as he set the plate down, she grabbed the pancakes in both hands and started tearing into them ravenously. It looked depressingly familiar.

“Hungry, huh?” he asked. She nodded, her mouth full.

“Can’t blame ya. Stancakes are always better with syrup, though!” He grabbed the bottle from the counter and handed it over. She took it from him, stared at the label for a moment, and then glanced between him and the bottle in an unspoken plea.

“Here,” said Stan. He popped the cap and turned the bottle over, dribbling a puddle of the amber liquid onto the plate. Eleven dipped a corner of her pancakes into it, suspiciously, but her eyes lit up when she took a bite. She grabbed the bottle back from Stan and flipped it upside down until her pancakes were swimming in syrup.

“You know you can put this on Eggos, too,” Stan said. Eleven froze, her eyes getting even wider. She stared at him, then at the pancakes, then back at him. Her hands and most of her face were covered with syrup and she looked ridiculous. Ridiculous and happy.

Stan laughed. She seemed startled at first but then she laughed too, a smile creeping up from behind the half-eaten pancakes she was still holding. When she giggled, her nose touched the pancakes and came away sticky, and the moment of shock on her face made Stan laugh even more. For some reason the little interdimensional runaway surprised by the feeling of cheap corn syrup on her nose was the funniest thing he had ever seen.

When he finally calmed down, he made his way back to the stove. There was still a lot of batter to get through, and it was possible that the days of little sleep and less food were getting to him. He felt a little dizzy, and he still couldn’t really stop chuckling. It would serve him right if he fainted after making such a fuss about Eleven not walking to the kitchen.

“Want more?” he asked.

The girl nodded. Nodded properly this time, with quick eager up-and-down motions and a tiny smile.

“All right!” Stan picked up the spatula, twirling it like a baton. “Second round of Stancakes coming right up!”

*

They used up the entire box of pancake mix. Stan paused every once in a while to sit down and eat some slightly less syrupy pancakes, and to make sure Eleven didn’t make herself sick. She gobbled down everything he put in front of her, barely pausing to breathe. He tried asking her when she’d last eaten, but she just looked at him and shrugged. He supposed that was fair. There was no telling how long she’d been unconscious before she came through the Portal.

Her nose hadn’t bled again, and her eye movement was good. Whatever she’d gone through, it looked like she was more or less stable for now. Stan heaved a sigh of relief, looking across the table to where Eleven was drooping over her second mug of hot chocolate.

“Hey, you,” he said. “Looks like bedtime.”

She didn’t protest as he swung her up into his arms and carried her back to the bedroom. She might be able to walk by now, but he wasn’t taking chances. It was a short distance down the hallway, but she was practically asleep by the time he arrived.

“Hey,” he said gently. She made a soft, unhappy noise and nuzzled her head into his shoulder. “Don’t want you falling asleep in those wet clothes, okay? You could get sick and then you’d need to eat medicine instead of Eggos. Gross, am I right?”

He’d forgotten about how damp her shirt and dress were earlier. There’d been . . . more pressing matters. But he knew from experience that we clothes were bad news, especially if you were already injured. He wasn’t going to let her get pneumonia or something. He wasn’t going to let anything bad happen to her if he could help it.

He sat her down on the edge of the bed and went rooting through the wardrobe as she watched him, wide-eyed, and clutched the oversized shirt around her. “I’ll hang those up to dry and you can get ‘em back in the morning, okay?” he said, and she nodded. It was back to the tiny, terse nod that didn’t betray any emotions.

Stan didn’t really wear flannel, but he thought he remembered . . . yes. There. At the bottom of a drawer that he didn’t open was a set of red flannel pajamas. The shirt was large enough to be a nightgown on Eleven. Stan hesitated for a moment before pulling it out, shutting the drawer quickly behind him.

“Here,” he said. “This is dry. Bathroom’s over—or not.”

She immediately shrugged off the shirt and Stan barely had time to close his eyes before she yanked the dress over her head. He stood still, listening to the rustling of cloth and trying not to think about why a kid would have so few qualms about disrobing in front of a stranger. He failed, and realized that his hands were instinctively curling into fists. He hid them behind his back so that Eleven wouldn’t see. He didn’t want her to think that he would hurt her. From the bits and pieces he’d picked up, it seemed like too many people already had.

The rustling stopped. Stan squinted one eye open and relaxed when he saw that Eleven was swathed in the oversized flannel pajama top. It reached nearly to her knees.

“Better?” he asked.

She nodded and lay back, curling up next to the headboard.

“We’ll get some clothes that are your size tomorrow. How about that?” Gosh, what was he thinking, talking like he was made of money? Food _and_ clothes on the same trip? He’d never be able to shoplift all that stuff! But it wasn’t like he had anything else to feed her, and he couldn't just let her keep wearing the same dirty pink dress forever.

Okay, no, not forever. Just until . . . he figured things out. Got Ford back. Found out where she came from. Found out if she had a family who wanted her back. This was short-term and there was no point in getting too attached.

“Night, Stan,” said Eleven in a small voice.

“Goodnight, kiddo,” he replied. She smiled at him gently as she closed her eyes.

Yep. No point at all.


	7. The Mystery of the Missing Week

She ran. Her legs throbbed and her throat felt raw and all she wanted to do was curl up and cry, but she couldn’t stop. Not now.

It was coming.

She didn’t dare look back. She knew it was faster than she was, that it was just a matter of time until she tripped or her leg gave out or it just caught up and she’d feel its claws close around her and then— God, she didn’t want to die. Her breath was loud in her ears—short, desperate gasps as she tried to gulp down enough oxygen to keep her going. It burned her lungs, burned her eyes.

Everything in this world was trying to kill her. The air, the sticky gray-limbed trees, the brackish water that smelled like burnt cork. Maybe she should just stop. Maybe the monster would be better, quicker than hanging on until she was too weak or sick to move.

But she kept running anyway. She wasn’t going to give that thing the—the damn satisfaction! Even if she couldn’t get away, even if getting eaten by some flower-faced death monster was inevitable, she’d fight it every step of the way! Shove her coat down its throat and hope the thing choked on it!

It wasn’t fair. Sixteen was too young to die. She was never going to go to college, or get a job, or kiss a girl. She hadn’t even had the time to have a proper crisis over the fact that she _wanted_ to kiss girls, because that was a future thing, and the present was always filled with tests and essays and listening to Nancy talk about whatever boy she was crushing on at the moment, and—and there was supposed to be _time_ to worry about the future! Time to _have_ a future.

She hadn’t even drunk that stupid beer.

A branch cracked under her foot and she stumbled, struggling to keep her footing on the slippery leaves. She caught a glimpse of her own bloody leg, the only color in this gray world, and then she was on the ground, rolling as she hit so at least she’d be a smaller target. The sob she’d been holding in escaped from her chest.

No. She wasn’t going to go out like this. The branch she’d tripped on was heavy. Maybe she’d be able to get in one good blow. Make sure she wasn’t an easy meal. Give it a scar to remember her by. It might be the only memorial she’d get . . .

She opened her eyes and reached out.

There was a person there. A human person. Alive. She grabbed their shoulders.

“You’ve got to run! You’ve got to get out of here! It’s coming!”

The stranger jumped, and she heard screams from the other room. Two different voices. No no no, there weren’t supposed to be other people here.

“You’re all in terrible danger! Please, there’s no time, just run!”

The stranger reached out and took her arms in a firm, gentle grip. She didn’t seem frightened. She needed to be frightened. Why wouldn’t she listen?

“Hey. It’s all right. You’re safe now.”

Safe? No, no, it would get them. Maybe it had already gotten the two in the other room—

Wait . . . room. She was inside. There were electric lights. Why did electric lights seem so miraculous? She was lying on something soft—a bed? No, a couch . . . And the woman in front of her, with her wet hair and movie-star cheekbones, was smiling reassuringly.

“But it . . .”

“What is it? What’s coming?”

She could feel the certainty sliding away. She’d been so sure, but now when she tried to think about it all she could remember were fragmented images that made no sense. A man without a face. A pool without water. A flower made of teeth. A blue flash . . .

“I . . .” She shook her head, but the more she tried to remember the less there was. “I’m sorry. Must have been a bad dream.”

“A really awful one, by the sound of it. Would you like some water?”

She nodded and sank back onto the couch. Even as the last wisps of the dream faded from her head, she felt uneasy. This wasn’t a house she knew. She took the water gratefully, steeling herself for the taste before she took a sip and then wondering why she’d expected it to be awful. It was just water.

She drank the rest of the glass slowly, taking the opportunity to piece together her surroundings. Thunder boomed through the window. She flinched, but didn’t spill the water. So there was a storm. Maybe that was why she remembered a flash?

The room was pretty bare-bones. Small. Not much furniture besides the couch she was on and a side table with a lamp in the shape of a bewildered-looking angel. Striped gray-green wallpaper that made her uneasy if she looked at it for too long, though for the life of her she couldn’t think why.

The two people she’d heard scream when she first woke up were peering around the doorway, eyes wide, as if they expected her to sprout fangs and pounce on them at any moment. That was rich. She wasn’t even sure she could stand. They saw her looking and ducked back—too quickly, she could hear the muffled thumps as they crashed into each other.

The woman who was sitting with her rolled her eyes. “Sorry about those two. They’re a little, shall we say, excitable?”

She took the empty water glass and set it on the side table under the disapproving gaze of the angel lamp.

“Um.” There were too many questions—about this place, about what had happened—that she didn’t know where to begin. “At the risk of being overdramatic, where am I? And, uh, _who_ am I? Everything’s very . . .” She waved her hand in a gesture that she hoped communicated, “It’s probably because I just woke up so I don’t want anyone to worry, but I don’t actually seem to remember anything and I’m more than a little freaked out at this entire situation.”

“Well,” said the woman. “If you mean existentially I can’t help you, but according to this your name’s Barbara Holland and you’re from Indiana.” She dug a driver’s license out of her pocket and held it out.

She’d been terrified that the license would look as strange as everything else around her, but as soon as she saw it she could feel things begin to slot into place inside her head.

“Barb. I . . . you can call me Barb.” A wave of relief washed over her. There. She just needed a little nudging. Her memory was scrambly, not missing, and the realization made her heart settle down into a more regular rhythm.

“Hi, Barb. I’m Shandra. We found you on the road.”

Barb shook the proffered hand and smiled weakly before staring back at the license—her license—for any other details it might be hiding. Her brow furrowed.

“Wait . . . you said ‘from Indiana.’ We’re not there now?”

Shandra shook her head. “Nope. We’re in Gravity Falls, Oregon.”

Barb had never been to Oregon in her life. She was sure. She was . . . pretty sure. The shape of her life was emerging out of the fog in her head, but the last section was stubbornly blank. She remembered a chemistry test . . . a missing boy . . . had he been kidnapped? Had _she_ been kidnapped? Had . . . no, don’t panic. Think. She seemed to be missing a shoe, but otherwise she was fully dressed, and she was sore all over but mostly on her legs and hand, so she probably hadn’t suffered the usual fate of teenage girls who got abducted. And she was alive. Look on the bright side here.

“Do you know how I got here?”

“Only the last few hundred feet. Sorry.”

_Oregon_. It would have taken days to drive there. God, had she been missing for days? Her mom would kill her, and Nancy must be worried sick, and did it count as an excused absence if she couldn’t even remember where she’d been?

“I don’t suppose you can tell me what day it is?”

“It’s the thirteenth of November. Sunday. 1983.”

Okay. Okay. It could be worse. It could be so much worse. She was missing . . . not even a week. That was . . . okay, nope. Perspective not working. She didn’t need to be some kind of Rip Van Winkle to find this whole thing completely terrifying.

Shandra had said something she hadn’t caught. “Pardon?”

“I said, what’s the last day you do remember? Maybe we can work backwards.”

Barb drew in a shaky breath. Right. Logic. They were still going to act like things made sense. That was probably worth a shot.

“Tuesday,” she said. “Tuesday night. There was . . .” She strained to remember. “My best friend dragged me to a party.”

“On Tuesday?” Barb jumped at the sound of the strange voice. The two boys had finally decided to venture out of the kitchen, though they looked like they were ready to run back there at any moment. It was the taller one who had spoken. Despite his height he was doing his best to hide behind his shorter, stouter companion.

Shandra rolled her eyes and mouthed “sorry” at Barb, who found herself shakily smiling back at her.

“Boys,” said Shandra, “This is Barb. Barb, this is Edwin, whose house we’re currently in, and—”

“Daryl. Right. Hi.” Barb waved at them, but they drew away.

“How did you know my name?”

“She’s a witch! I knew it!”

“It’s, uh, it says on your nametag?” Barb pointed out.

The boys looked down at the extremely prominent “DARYL” tag on the shorter one’s shirt. “Oh.”

“So!” said Shandra, in a voice that sounded like she was used to wrangling small children, which, if she spent much time around these two, probably wasn’t far off, “Now that you’ve been introduced and it appears that Miss Barbara is not, in fact, a horrific monster, maybe we can get back to figuring out how she got here. You were saying?”

“Right.” Barb cast her thoughts back to the last clear memory she had. “There was a party—yes, on a Tuesday. Absurd, right? But my best friend, she wanted to go see this boy and she made me come. It was . . . not fun.”

“You think someone from this party brought you here?” asked the taller boy—Edwin, right. Shandra hissed at him to be quiet. Barb shook her head.

“I mean, they were jerks, but like ‘drop your books on the floor and make suggestive comments’ jerks, not ‘drug you and take you to Oregon’. That’s . . . a level or two above, I’m pretty sure. Besides, if they were going to humiliate me they’d want everyone back home to see it. This isn’t their style.”

“Which leaves us,” said Shandra, “With the increasingly pressing question of whose style it is. Do you remember leaving the party?”

“No. I . . . I cut my hand trying to drink a beer and when I got back from cleaning myself up everyone else went off to be couple-y and my friend told me to go home and I sat by the pool and moped.”

“And?”

“That’s it.” She shrugged helplessly. “That’s all I remember.”

“Wow!” said Edwin. “You’re just like in those cautionary videos they show us at school!”

Shandra glared at him, but Barb chuckled weakly. “I guess. Next thing I know it’s almost a week later and I’m in Oregon trying to flag down a truck.” She laughed, because, well, what else could she do? If she actually tried to think about what was happening . . . what might have happened . . . she’d end up in the fetal position sobbing her eyes out, and that would make this whole thing even more embarrassing. So she laughed.

“A truck?” said Shandra sharply.

“Yeah.” Barb stopped laughing and looked at her warily. “You were in a pickup. You stopped for me. I was scared at first . . . because of your hood?”

Shandra and Daryl stared at each other for a moment, and Daryl took a step further away from her.

“What?” said Barb.

Shandra took a deep breath, then spoke calmly. “Barb, my car’s not a pickup. We swerved to avoid you; that’s why the car’s out there in a ditch. And my jacket doesn’t even have a hood. I can show you, but—”

“No.” Barb shook her head. “No, I remember—”

“I believe you!” Shandra assured her. “I believe that you remember it, but that wasn’t us.” She noticed Barb’s wide eyes and shallow breathing and laid a comforting hand on her shoulder. “This is good, Barb. It gives us something to work with. We’ll figure out what happened and get you home safe, I promise. And once the storm lets up we’ll go down to the hospital, maybe the police station—”

“No!”

“You won’t get in trouble for going to a party,” said Shandra, but Barb was shaking her head frantically.

“No, it’s not that, it’s—I remembered. You’re right, it wasn’t you in the truck. There were three people, and they all had red hoods over their faces, but one of them—he got something from his belt and I saw his badge. It was—he was a policeman.” She swallowed. “I don’t know what they did. All I remember after that is a flash of light and then waking up here, but we can’t—we shouldn’t talk to them. It’s not safe. For any of us.”

Daryl looked like he was going to be sick. Edwin looked like he was going to faint. But Shandra had a predatory gleam in her eyes and a wild grin on her face.

“Who cares about safe?” she said. “This is a _story_.”


	8. The Pushover

Stan shifted uneasily in his seat. He didn’t even need to look up to feel all the eyes on them. This was why he didn’t come into town much if he could help it. Small towns, especially in the winter when there was nothing to talk about except how much snow and fallen that week and whose pipes had frozen, were nosy as hell.

Heck. Nosy as heck.

He pinched the bridge of his nose. This kid was getting to him. He felt guilty swearing even in the privacy of his own head. That wasn’t how things were supposed to work; his thoughts were the one thing that people _couldn’t_ hold against him. Shame he was so good at holding them against himself.

The girl was sitting across from him, ramrod straight, looking belligerently at the menus on the table. His only good coat sat huge and heavy on her shoulders. It made her look like a doll some kid had dressed up in their old clothes, but at least it would keep her warm. For his part, Stan was grateful for the heat of the diner. He’d pulled out his old jacket from the closet—it was stained and threadbare and he tried not to look too hard at the patch on the shoulder, but he’d been too poor for too long to think about throwing it away—and resigned himself to shivering through the car ride over.

Eleven hadn’t wanted to come at first, had curled up in a corner of the bed and shook her head. It had been hard to convince her that they were far away from wherever she’d been before, so far that he wasn’t sure how to explain it.

In the end, he’d carried her down to the basement to show her the Portal.

“See?” he’d said. “Don’t know where you came from, but it wasn’t here. This thing . . . I don’t know what it connects to, but wherever it is it’s farther than I can understand and those bad people are all on the other side. Okay?”

She’d stared at him with huge, terrified, skittish-animal eyes and refused to step out from behind his legs, but she’d nodded.

He’d thought the diner would be a good first stop. They could sit down, get some food, maybe sweet-talk their way into not paying for it—Eleven was a cute kid, it was worth a shot—and then go deal with the rest of their errands. They both could use something warm inside them.

But all the staring was making him nervous. He knew that even after a year in Gravity Falls he was still considered a mysterious stranger by most of the townsfolk, and adding a smaller mysterious stranger wasn’t going to do anything to keep their tongues from waggling.

“Hey there, Mister Mystery!”

Susan plonked down their menus and a couple of water glasses. She was altogether too cheerful for someone with a permanent lazy eye, which, heh, he liked to not think about too much, and that was one reason he wasn’t a regular at the diner. The other reason was that it was hard to dine and dash when everyone knew where you lived.

“Can I get you a coffee, hon?”

Stan gave her his most dazzling smile. “Sure thing!”

Feigning surprise, as if she hadn’t been staring along with everyone else when they came in, Susan turned to Eleven and said, “Ooooh, and who’s this?”

“My niece,” said Stan. “My brother’s kid.”

“Ooooh,” said the waitress again. She talked like they paid her by the vowel. When he didn’t elaborate, she leaned close to him and stage-whispered, “The brother who died?”

Silently cursing the ability of diner waitresses to hang on to every shred of local gossip, and wondering what it said about his life that he was about to pass a girl who wasn’t even from this planet off as his own orphaned daughter, Stan nodded. “Yeah. It’s been hard for all of us, of course. Her mom just needs some time to herself, so El’s up here with me for a while. Ain’t that right, kiddo?”

Eleven smiled tentatively at him and nodded.

“Course the dang bus lost her luggage,” Stan continued. “Should have known better than to leave anything important in a suitcase. We’re off to get her a proper coat and hat after this.”

Susan nodded. Then she put on that stage whisper again. “I saw her hair. Is she . . . ?”

“Oh, you know kids,” said Stan. “Tried to give herself bangs with mom’s old scissors, and then there were lice at school, so they figured chop it all off would be easiest.”

Eleven didn’t contradict him. He’d given her basic instructions in the car—“Look, just agree with whatever I say”—but part of him had been expecting her to ignore them as much as she’d ignored his orders to stay put after she’d first woken up.

“Awwwww, you poor thing! Let me get you some food!”

“But we haven’t ordered—”

“Don’t you worry about that, hon,” said the waitress, turning away. “Wink!” she added over her shoulder.

Stan met Eleven’s eyes across the table. “Thanks for playing along,” he said, in an actual whisper that was nearly drowned out by the chatter and the sound of things being fried.

She smiled at him again, but this time it was different. Instead of the blank nervous uncertainty there was a mischievous glimmer in her eyes and a proud little smirk on her lips.

Stan couldn’t help but laugh. He remembered the thrill of lying to people back when it was just a game, before his life or well-being depended on how well he could spin a yarn. He remembered the way he would grin at Ford when saps on the boardwalk bought his lines, the way he felt when he first realized that truth was relative and if you were confident enough and skilled enough you could make anything true.

Well. Almost anything. It had been a long time since lying felt like more than a job, a stopgap to hold himself up. Once the truth had just been boring but now it was bleak, ready to swallow him whole if he made a wrong step. But there in the diner, seeing the sparkle awake in Eleven’s eyes, he remembered for the first time in a long while: lying could be _fun_.

“I like ‘El,’” she said.

“Huh?”

“El.” She pointed to herself.

Ah. “Better than Eleven?”

She nodded vigorously.

At that point, Susan returned to their table with a mug of coffee for Stan and a hot chocolate for El. “Food’ll be right out, hons,” she said.

Stan dumped most of the sugar packets from their table into his coffee. It was the proper diner stuff, black as midnight and thick as pitch. Nothing like what he could make at home.

El was staring at her mug of cocoa with an expression somewhere between fear and awe.

“It’s like what I made you last night,” Stan explained. “Just has whipped cream on it. Here.”

He swiped his finger through the top of the cream and then popped it into his mouth, giving a loud “Mmmm!” of satisfaction. El looked uncertain for a moment before following his example. He laughed at the way her eyes widened when she tasted the cream and how quickly she pulled the mug towards her and slurped up the rest of it.

“Good, huh?”

She nodded. “Yeah. Good.”

“Maybe we’ll pick some up at the store,” said Stan without thinking, then immediately regretted it. They were supposed to get real food, not cans of fat and sugar, but at the way El’s eyes lit up when he suggested it he couldn’t take the offer back.

This was dangerous. She was dangerous. Stan was a hardened criminal. He was supposed to be immune to this sort of puppy-dog eye junk. He was supposed to be thinking about how to get her home, or, if home really was as bad as he suspected, find someone who actually knew something about kids to look after her. He definitely wasn’t supposed to be thinking about what her reaction to the candy aisle would be, or how many boxes of toaster waffles he could fit in the freezer, or which part of the house would be easiest to turn into a bedroom—a temporary bedroom! For a temporary guest, who . . .

Moses, when did he turn into such a pushover?

El gasped audibly when Susan returned. She was carrying two plates, each bigger than her head, and they were stacked high with . . . well, everything. Eggs. Toast. Pancakes. Hash browns. Sausage and bacon and slices of ham. One of those fancy eggy pancakes rolled up with strawberries inside, dusted with powered sugar. A cinnamon roll that could probably feed four.

Stan’s stomach grumbled and his mouth watered just looking at it, but he forced himself to lay a hand on Susan’s arm and say, “Hey, woah, we didn’t order all this stuff.”

“I told you, don’t worry about it!” said Susan. “You both could use some feeding up!”

It was definitely true in El’s case, and while Stan had always been flabby around the middle he had to admit that he hadn’t been eating well lately. Still, he had to make sure.

“You mean we don’t have to pay for this?”

“Replacing her luggage is enough to worry about! Just don’t be a stranger, Mister Mystery!”

She left with a giggle that under other circumstances Stan probably would have thought sounded forced and nasal, but currently seemed positively angelic. He didn’t take charity, but if people wanted to lavish El with free food that wasn’t his problem. Besides, she’d already brought it out. It would be a shame to let any of it go to waste.

El was staring at the mountain of food with wide, awestruck eyes. She caught Stan watching her, looked up at him, and giggled. Actually giggled.

“Well,” he said, “Dig in!”

*

Stan wasn’t sure he’d ever been more full in his life. It was glorious. Beside him, El snuggled into the passenger seat and smiled sleepily. She’d eaten more than he had; he was amazed that so much food could fit into a kid that skinny.

The diner seemed to have relaxed her, and the rest of their shopping hadn’t been nearly as stressful as he’d expected. He’d spent too much money, but what else was new. At this rate, he’d probably have to take a few odd jobs to keep the mortgage paid through the off-season. But that was a problem for later. For now they had groceries and good socks and a coat that actually fit her, and El’s toes were warm inside a pair of winter boots they’d found on clearance. The car’s heater was even working for once. Stan felt full and comfortable and happy.

Which is probably why he didn’t see the deer.

He wasn’t even speeding, but the corner was tight and he’d been glancing over at El to make sure she was all right, and when he looked back there was a huge _thing_ right in the middle of the road. It was too close to swerve. Too close to do anything. Stan screamed and slammed on the breaks and waited for the impact.

It never came.

The car screeched to a halt, back tires skidding on the wet road. Stan couldn’t let go of the wheel. He couldn’t process what had just happened. One moment he’d been about to take out the buck and the car and possibly himself, and the next the road was clear and the deer was flying over them. _Flying_. He knew that hitting animals would sometimes make them pop up over the hood, but . . . he hadn’t hit it. He knew he hadn’t.

In the rearview mirror, he watched as the deer landed gently on the ground, shook its head, and walked away. It had floated down like it was a loose piece of paper and not a several-hundred-pound animal that should have just totaled his car.

Stan peeled his hands off the wheel but kept his foot pressed tight to the brake pedal, as if that would stop the town from being so darn crazy. He turned to ask El if she was all right, but the words died on his lips.

The girl had one hand stretched out in front of her, the way she had when she’d first woken up. She looked scared, which made sense, but it wasn’t like she was afraid of the deer. It was like she was afraid of Stan. She reached up with her left arm and wiped the blood spilling from her nose on the sleeve of her new coat, then slowly lowered her other hand.

“Wait . . .” said Stan. The hand. The blood. The concentration in her face before it gave way to fear. “Did . . . did you . . .?”

She nodded.

Stan’s child-appropriate vocabulary failed him.

“What the _hell_?”


End file.
